Optical lenses, in particular ophthalmic lenses, whether made of mineral glass or organic glass, commercially available are commonly provided with one or more property enhancing coatings on one or both of their main faces for improving mechanical and/or optical properties of the final lens. Typically, those coatings are used for improving the adhesion of another coating to the lens, improving the impact resistance and/or the scratch resistance of the lens, imparting antireflective or anti-soil/anti-smudge or anti-fog properties to the lens.
It is also common to subject a lens face, uncoated or coated, to a corona discharge or atmospheric plasma treatment prior to the deposition of a further coating composition in order to improve adhesion of the coating on the lens main face or the surface of the previously deposited property enhancing coating.
In certain circumstances, corona discharge treatment or atmospheric plasma treatment is used to eliminate an outer coating, in particular an outer temporary coating, deposited on one or both main faces of an optical lens prior to applying a novel outer coating, generally having different properties than the eliminated coating, on the lens main faces. This is the case when an outer temporary coating is used for improving adhesion of the lens to the maintaining pad during an edging operation of the optical lens.
Typically, for the corona discharge treatment and atmospheric plasma treatment, the lens is just placed flat on a belt or a similar device with the surface to be treated freely accessible for the intended treatment.
Thus, the operator must manually turn the lens if both faces have to be treated by corona discharge or atmospheric plasma and manually placed the lens in a lens holder after the corona discharge or atmospheric plasma treatment for the subsequent coating deposition steps, for example a dip coating step and a curing step.